Odd news clipping

Odd news clipping

• Jul 03, 2025
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My understanding of the Later family’s movements between Quebec and the United States began with an odd newspaper clipping about George King Later and his sister Agnes Thompson reuniting in Rochester, N.H., in 1927 after 50 years of separation. I had already seen some anomalies in the records of family members, including two other brothers as well as Agnes, regarding their Canadian births and parents’ nationality. I think this was done to cover their undocumented status as U.S. immigrants, which I will discuss further below.

But that wasn’t the peculiar part. Agnes Later was just 12 years old, or maybe as young as nine, when she married Hollis Thompson in Conway, N.H. in 1867 or 1870. They had a son, divorced, remarried, and had two other children, living all that time in Rochester, a town on the Maine border upriver from Portsmouth. She was 69 years old in 1927 when her brother visited from Chicago, and then she died less than a year later.